All-Star Game 'counts' only if you're counting stupid

The RosenBlog

Listen up, stupid (and you know who you are, Bud Selig), using the All-Star Game to determine home-field advantage for the World Series becomes more idiotic every year.

Selig and Fox Sports tell us the game "counts," but sorry, the game cannot count when fans vote. Fans might be smarter than baseball commissioners, but that’s not resounding credibility. I mean, Dan Uggla’s a starter? Seriously? OK, fine, fans CAN be as stupid as commissioners.

Either way, this cannot be "their" game with their favorite players if it also decides something as significant as the site of a potential Game 7 of what is supposed to be the sport’s crown jewel. Help me out here: Did fans vote on the lineup that Tony La Russa used in last year’s World Series?

I’ll hang up and listen for Selig’s hummena-hummena-hummena.

I swear, Selig must get bonuses each time television tells him to gin up a cockamamie idea to minimize the World Series?

The game cannot count when players’ voting biases seem to hurt their team’s chances by excluding someone as deserving as A.J. Pierzynski. It’s not that players hate the White Sox catcher. In fact, Pierzynski’s career is over when everybody stops hating him.

But here’s Selig’s laughable idea to make the game count, and here are players from the same league as Pierzynski keeping him out. Do players think they gets points for stupidity?

The game cannot count when every team has to be represented. It either includes only the best players because it counts or it doesn’t. This rule goes back to a time when baseball had two leagues and America had one television. Quick, someone tell the dope in charge of this sport that games are televised all the time everywhere and we’re 15 years into interleague play. Sorry, Cubs, Astros, Phillies, Mariners, Padres, Rockies and Twins, but you stink and your guys aren’t invited. Play better, then we’ll talk.

The game cannot count when managers try to get every player into the game. This isn’t Little League where everybody has to play at least two innings.

The game cannot count when, say, Justin Verlander cannot pitch nine innings, or as much as he can. Same goes for Jered Weaver and Chris Sale. But they aren’t always rested because smart teams schedule them for games that actually matter. The Sox asked that Sale not even be considered for the starting role because they didn’t want him throwing more than one inning because this game just doesn’t matter.

The game cannot count when players are encouraged to tweet and post on Facebook right there in the dugout as soon as they are taken out of the game. That’s the new big idea this season. Nothing says “It counts’’ more than "Matt Wieters likes this."

The game cannot count when so many rules and tacit understandings prevent teams from playing it the way they do every other day of the season.